Devizes Melting Pot

“Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don't scare me. "I'm damned if I'll crawl, my children's children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin' harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact." (Moh Kohn, The Star Fraction)/
"This is the fight between God and the Devil. If His Grace is with God, he must join me, if he is for the Devil he must fight me. There is no third way" King Gustavus Adolphus

Judges have sparked a "constitutional crisis" by their decision to quash the government's control orders, the chair of the home affairs select committee claimed today.

A key plank of the government's anti-terror legislation is now in legal limbo after a high court judge ruled yesterday that orders confining suspects to their home and curtailing who they can meet breach the European Convention on Human Rights.

Today John Denham, a former minister and highly respected backbencher, put the blame firmly at the door of the judges and demanded urgent talks between politicians and the judiciary to resolve the situation before it escalated any further.

Good days like these are so very rare these days, make the most of it.

As a textbook example of hi-tech precision bombardment it could hardly be improved. Smoke was still rising yesterday from the scorched wreckage of the six transformers at Gaza's only power station, each destroyed by a single missile fired by an Israeli warplane some 10 hours earlier.

Had they hit the huge cylindrical diesel tank 100 metres away they would have set the whole power station alight. But the strike was clinically effective, cutting all the electricity to 700,000 Gaza consumers, threatening water supplies and depriving its public of light, cooking, broadcast news, and a crucial issue in scorching summer temperatures fans.

"I'm so surprised that they did this," said Dr Derar Abu Sisi, the operations manager at the Al Nusirat power station. "We have been right through the worst of the intifada but this didn't happen." It would, Dr Abu Sisi said, take a "minimum of three to six months" to restore supplies at a cost between $5m (£2.8m) and $7m. "The Geneva Convention says it is not allowed to attack infrastructure for the civilian people," he added. "You might expect that economic infrastructure could be a target in the last stages of a war. But this is not like that."

It is upsetting reading about what is currently going on in the Gaza Strip, I have a friend there, a nurse who works at Rafah Hospital and when I ask him how he is, his first reply is 'I am surviving', I honestly don't know how he does it.

It always seems like one step forward and two steps back with the Israel/Palestine situation and it provokes such fierce arguments from both sides.

I don't claim to have the ultimate solution but I think if Palestinians were given jobs and are able to earn a decent wage I'm sure young men would not be tempted to blow themselves up or kidnap Israeli soldiers, its really quite simple, give them something to live for.

In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.(snip)The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

This article voices many of the fears I have about Blair's government. Under his Premiership he has done more to crimialise behaviour, its a case of guilty untill proven innocent. Its ironic that the Judges and the House of Lords would become bastions of civil liberties, standing up to the obessive controlling behaviour of Blair and his NuLab lackeys.

Sven-Goran Eriksson is confident that his reign as England manager will extend beyond this afternoon and says that his players have much more of a winning mentality than they did in Japan four years ago.

'I have never thought this will be my last game, never even dreamt of that,' Eriksson admitted as he prepared his players to face unfancied Ecuador in temperatures verging on the tropical at 35 degrees. 'The heat will not help us but World Cups are often played in conditions like this and we will just have to cope. We can't go on complaining about it.

'We have reached the stage of life or death for the team now, not just for me, and that is extremely exciting. I think we will thrive on it and firmly believe you will see a better performance from England. We will play good football and we will win.

Ecuador should give England a run for its money, after all this is a team that practices at 9000 feet, so that must cound towards something.

My dad has high hopes for Spain (one of the teams he has backed to lose in the final), for the first time they have proceeded onto the final 16.

Argentina are also one of the best teams in this world cup, if there was a league, they would be top, whether they will last the distance is another matter.

England are a slow burner, I bet we'll end up against Germany and lose to penalties.

and finally France, a team with lots of great players, but they don't seem very cohesive, the French coach has not learnt from Arsène Wenger who built his Arsenal team round the extremly talented Thierry Henry.

The US authorities have charged seven suspected militants in connection with an alleged plot to destroy the country's tallest building.

They were planning to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower, the FBI says. It adds that the seven had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda, but had no contacts with it.

They were arrested at a warehouse in Miami, during an undercover operation.

The group - infiltrated by an agent posing as an al-Qaeda member - includes two foreigners and five US citizens.

I think the FBI informant must of been just walking around the area making suggestions to this Miami group and hoping one of them bites and start talking about their fantasy of 'bombing' and 'terrorism'.

They probaly have thousands of FBI agent provocateur's around the USA trying to get other male muslim men to open up and talk about their fanatasies, and thats just what they are, fanatasies, but its enough to lead to arrest and all the publicity that it entails.

It all seems a little bit staged to me

George Bush is tanking in the Polls, so I bet he rang up whoever runs the FBI and demanded that good news be produced.

Tony Blair today defied some of Britain's leading crime experts by outlining plans to "reclaim" the criminal justice system and change the mindset of an "out of touch" political and legal establishment.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

NAHALEEN*

How many moonsdeparted tonight? How many homesremain without light?The fields mournfor their loversand for the vines.The jujube explodes in the conqueror's face.The wall is redthe street is redthe color of treesis redas is the color of the earth and the sun.The ears of corn tell methat martyrs' bloodare the songs' winethat maidens' dreamsare dewdropson the eyelids of wheat.

Nahaleen

what could have driventhe sorrow out of your eyesother than the steadfastnessof the grassunder the conqueror's boot?What could protect theand pigeons' nestsfrom the blazethe daisies' field,children's eyes,or wild thymeor bare arms? Oh Nahaleen!The horses are racing toward youto place a paradise at your feet.And passionate songs blossom everywherelife emerges victorious.

Monday, June 12, 2006

The Bush administration stared down a new wave of international condemnation of Guantánamo yesterday, dismissing the suicides by three inmates of the prison camp as a "good PR move" on their part and an "act of asymmetrical warfare".

The deaths of two Saudis and a Yemeni, who used knotted bedsheets to hang themselves in their solitary cells, brought renewed calls from European governments and human rights organisations to bring the 460 inmates to trial, or close down the camp. But Bush administration officials rejected suggestions that the three had killed themselves in despair over their indefinite confinement.

This makes me so angry, the US and British governments should be ashamed of themseleves, what despicable people we have in power at the moment, they have no conscience at all.

It is repungent the way these detainees are held in limbo, either charge them with something or let them go, it is inhumane to keep them caged like animals and refusing to tell them what they are charged with, I am sick and tired of the excuses the Bush Junta and their lackey Blair make, its an abomination.

Its no wonder much of the Muslim world has a poor view of the American and British governments, both countries should give some serious thought to what freedom, justice and democracy really mean.

PARIS (Reuters) - More than 20 states, mostly in Europe, colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA prisons and transfers of terrorism suspects, a European rights watchdog said in a report released on Wednesday.

European states were aware of or took part in a network run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that stretched from Central Asia to the Caribbean, via the Middle East and North Africa, the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly said.

"It is now clear -- although we are still far from having established the whole truth -- that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities," said investigator Dick Marty.

"Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know," Marty said in the conclusions of the 65-page report released on the body's Web site.

Gives me the warm fuzzies knowing that Europe has been colluding with the CIA in the rendition of terror suspects.

Don't leaders like Blair always go on about how we're a 'bastion of freedom and human rights'? The west with its supriority complex thinks its so much more better than everyone else, yet are quite happy to send terrorism suspects to torture friendly countries.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Be afraid, be very afraid. It is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year (ok, the 2006th year, but disregard that minor distraction) and 666 is the number of the beast. Is it a bad omen or just hype?

Significant dates have an uncanny appeal, whether they portend the apocalypse or just a big party. When it came to 1 January, 2000, it inspired hopes and fears of both.

Something similar happened on New Year's Eve 999, when a huge crowd gathered in Rome to await the end of the world, until at midnight the Pope blessed them and sent them home. Whether a smaller group of pedants turned up twelve months later is not recorded.

The date of the beast - 06/06/06 - should be irresistible then. "Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six," says Revelation, the last and obscurest book of the Bible.

The bodies of 6,000 people, most of whom died violently, have been received by Baghdad's main mortuary so far this year, health ministry figures show.

The number has risen every month, to 1,400 in May. The majority are believed to be victims of sectarian killings.

But observers say the real death toll could be much higher.

Meanwhile police said nine severed heads were found near Baquba to the north of Baghdad - days after a similar discovery there.

In another development, Iraq's prime minister says he plans to release 2,500 prisoners.

I thought Iraq was a 'democracy' now? Seems to me its looks like an ongoing bloodbath, beside the insurgency and the civil war, you have mini civil wars breaking out amongst the Shia militias, and guess who is caught in the middle? yep its the US led Coalition of the Ever Decreasing who are caught in the middle and are quite clearly out of their depth.

Those who supported this war need to stop deluding themseleves that everything is going well in Iraq. Its not and it will not improve anytime soon.

Monday, June 05, 2006

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has been funneling more than $100,000 a month to warlords battling Islamist militia in Somalia, according to a Somalia expert who has conferred with the groups in the country.

The U.S. operation, which former intelligence officials say is aimed at preventing emergence of rulers who could provide al Qaeda with a safe haven akin to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, appeared to be seriously set back on Monday when an Islamic coalition claimed control of Mogadishu. U.S. government officials refused to discuss any possible secret U.S. involvement in the strategically placed Horn of Africa state, which has been wrecked by years of fighting.

But former U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said an operation to support the warlords' alliance appeared to involve both the CIA and U.S. military.

John Prendergast, who monitors Somalia for the think-tank International Crisis Group, said he learned during meetings with alliance members in Somalia that the CIA was financing the warlords with cash payments.

This is not suprising, the US during their invasion of Afghanistan were quite happy to work with less than savoury warlords there.

Then you have the US history of backing the death squads in Central America and propping up fascist dictatorships.

So excuse me why I remain cynical of the Iraq War and 'The War on Terror'.